From the sixth to the thirteenth, I had an unusually productive break from school. Normally when I’m home on vacation, I… don’t do much. I don’t necessarily think that’s always a bad thing, though, because I’ve been pretty tired and stressed out from college all the other times I’ve been home this year so I think I needed some time to relax.

This time, however, I was motivated to Do All The Things – and while I may not have gotten everything done, I did get a bunch of stuff done and I’m super proud of myself for that!

My main goal for last week was to clean my room. Not very exciting, I know, but it needed to be done. I create massive paper trails seemingly everywhere I go and that, combined with a tendency to “clean” my room by simply moving all the stuff I don’t want to deal with at the moment into a random corner of my room, made it necessary to go through all my stuff and decide what to keep, what to throw away, what to donate, et cetera.

It took me 3.5 days to finish the entire project, but I’m really happy with the end result. I wanted to do this while I still had the motivation, and I really didn’t want to come home for Thanksgiving or winter break and be faced with a massive task when I possibly would not have as much motivation to tackle it as I had just now.

While at home, I also decided what to leave at home and what to bring to school. I won’t say too much about this here because I think it’ll be a fun idea for a future post, but basically I brought a bunch of stuff to school with me last year and never ended up using it… meanwhile, there were also many things that I DIDN’T bring and wished I had. For instance, I have a ton of unused notebooks and it seems silly not to write in them, so I took them with this year.

On a related note, I bought some plants! (Actually, my mom did and I still owe her money…) I also bought tiny flowerpots and painted them so now they’re super cute. I have a row of succulents and other plants on my windowsill at school now! One of my goals for this semester is to make what little space I do have here feel more liveable, and the plants really help with that. If it weren’t for them I would probably keep the curtains drawn 24/7 because I am secretly a grouchy troll, but instead I open them first thing every morning to let the sun in and it makes the room so much nicer!

Occasionally I took a break from all the cleaning to do a bit of reading! I read The Little Prince just for fun because I want to see the movie on Netflix sometime later this week, and I got a head start on my assigned reading for this semester as well!

I want this semester to be as stress-free as possible – you may notice that I’m currently all about Big Goals related to making this The Best School Year Ever, but we’ll have to see how long this actually lasts – and so I want to make my heavy workload as light as possible by starting early and working hard. I’m taking seventeen hours of classes per week, which is more than I’ve ever taken before, so I want to make sure that I hit the ground running once school begins.

I also VISITED PEOPLE. Every time I come home approximately 5091256021.5 friends and relatives are all like, “We haven’t seen you in forever and we miss you! You should come see us.” And they always ask what classes I’m taking in the upcoming summer, and I ALWAYS forget. The information just falls out of my brain right then and then and I’m left saying, “Well, probably a journalism course or two, since that’s one of my majors… I’m not being sarcastic, I just literally don’t remember. I’M SO SO SORRY.”

Last but not least, I watched the Olympics! I didn’t watch as many events as I have in the past – I haven’t seen any diving or track and field yet, though they’ve been some of my favorites in years past -but it’s been kind of fun to curl up in the family room at the end of the day and embark on a running commentary (no pun intended) with my brother: “Well, I could do that.” The more outlandishly impressive the athlete’s skill, the more fun it is to say you can do it, too… but that you just choose not to.

Anyway, THE OLYMPICS. I’ve been feeling so sad and stressed lately because it seems like everything in the world is falling apart and/or Donald Trump has a very real chance of becoming president and Destroying EverythingTM, so it’s been nice to have the Olympics as a distraction – all those inspiring stories! (Is Simone Biles even human?!)

And it’s just like WOW I HAVE SO MANY CRUSHES NOW THANKS. Rio Olympics: Making Elizabeth gayer in 2016. I need to find like some Olympic-sized pools so I can fall in and pretend I don’t know how to swim so that Katie Ledecky will come rescue me with her Big Muscles.

So that was my week. I organized SO MANY things, read, talked to people, and Got GayerTM… so, clearly the best kind of productive week. What did you do?

3 Responses to A Quick Break From School | Cleaning, Reading, & A Surprising Amount Of PRODUCTIVITY

I’ve been watching the Olympics as well and OH MY GOD SIMONE BILES! Not only is she an insanely talented gymnast, but she’s very young, was raised in foster care, and is hella good looking. Like WOW. I can’t even anymore.